Three Hours Between Flights
by melissaisdown
Summary: They met as teenagers. Their lives were defined by the short time they shared, the love they inevitably lost. Until one day the past returns, unemployed. House/Cuddy, AU.
1. Three Hours

A/N: This is a story I've had in my head for a while & have actually done different variations of in orig fic. This is a House/Cuddy version, that is peculiarly AU in that yes, it's AU, but some canon events have happened, just under different circumstances. You'll see. Additionally, since this hinges on childhood (and because kids discriminate outside their own age bracket), I made them closer to the same age, Cuddy is less than 3 years younger. The past is in past tense, present is late 90s, circa post infarction and in present tense, pretty simple.

Hopefully this will help waiting to see their collegiate canon past revealed Monday. Please review and enjoy. Thanks for reading!

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**Three Hours Between Flights**

The mailbox was blue. Stout and lonely it stood at the end of her driveway. Blue, except for metallic silver patches where the paint wore thin.

The day he moved to her block, back to the state he was born in, that blue mailbox was the first thing he saw.

How long had she lived there? Longer than he could stay.

Longer than he would stay, he knew even that first day.

_**three hours**_

Greg House sits in baggage claim, waiting. Ruminating. An airport terminal is an appropriate setting for such nostalgic contemplation. Arrivals and departures, home and away is then and again.

With a twist of his wrist he sees he's late, already––for another interview at another hospital that won't hire him.

He's only supposed to be in New Jersey for three hours.

His carryon completes its revolution on the conveyor belt and he stands, slanting heavy on the cane and starting over as he steps out. The crisp chill of the autumn morning sedates his despondency. Wide awake, he stands at the curb. Reaching for a prescription bottle, his hand is in front of his face when a taxi pulls up. He swallows to see the reflection in the windshield is wearing yesterday's beard.

He forgot to shave.

The irony doesn't escape him that he remembers everything else.

An hour after landing, he's been removed from Princeton General by security, adding a fat lip and bloody nose to his already gruff disheveled exterior.

Injured and with two hours to spare, House steps into the free clinic of the nearest hospital he hasn't been banned from.

It's congested, with parents coughing and their kids crying.

There's an instant as he signs in when the recollection precedes the thought and the next three days, the rest of his life, falls into place. He notices a name.

Dr. L. Cuddy

"This wouldn't be a Lisa Cuddy, would it?" House asks a nurse after a minute, pointing to her name on the sheet.

The nurse nods. House pauses, glancing the directory without turning his head completely. She's a department head. Endocrinology. He formulates a lie.

"My cousin had pancreatitus last year. Said she was stellar. Could I possibly request her?"

"It'll be more than an hour."

"I'll wait," he says smiling because the nurse has no idea how long he has been.

Ninety patient minutes later, he's diagnosed seventeen people, emptying the waiting room only to see it refilled. Cuddy comes out, almost impressed by the outsider's ability to evacuate this place with diagnoses. She picks up the chart of her next patient then turns her head, conspicuously searching the crowd for a familiar face.

Greg House.

It can't be. Not her House, not here, not now. She adjusts her posture, just in case, and tries to tame her hair in the metallic reflection at the top of the clipboard. Then she hollers the name she hasn't said in twenty years (of the boy she's thought of every day).

Whether he remembers her she can't tell immediately and, realizing her biggest fear is being forgotten, her eyes freeze on the first thing she sees: his cane. When she realizes what she's doing, her stare darts away quickly and she smiles, leading him back to an exam room.

An involuntary 'oh' escapes after she closes the door and turns to see the dried crimson crescent on his lip, the bruise curving around his eye. And now his nose is starting to bleed again. Cuddy reaches for a tissue.

"I guess this is what you're here for," she says dumbly, having forgotten what she read on the chart a second before.

House stays silent, leering inquisitive and leaning forward like her touch is an incomplete question and she's asking more than daubing a deserved nosebleed. His unrelenting gaze has Cuddy feeling like she's the one being examined. She wipes one last time, nervously and unnecessarily.

"How bad does it hurt?"

A delayed surprise surfaces with the sound of her voice. He was half-expecting a schoolgirl soprano, not the professional, mature, sexy tone, wearing lipstick and expensive perfume. He sighs after a moment, a certain gesture insinuating the stupidity of the question. Really he just wants to listen.

"I can write you a prescription for––"

"You don't remember me," he finally figures out.

Cuddy looks up from the prescription pad and holds his glance. Her first instinct is to raise a palm to his unshaven jaw, run her thumb across the crease of his lips. She wants to kiss him and make it better, to kiss him and show she remembers.

"I could never forget you, House."

Her attempt is to say it dryly, devoid of or at least with vague emotion, but there's a fondness, as well as a sadness in her words. House smiles.

"Little Lisa Cuddy," he starts wistful. "The girl next door became the girl with a God complex," recalling a time when she made him feel like he could walk on water.

"I'm not a girl anymore, I'm a doctor." With tenure.

"The latex gloves say doctor, but the cleavage _screams_ stripper."

"Had to pay for med school somehow."

The back and forth established rapport, adding banter to bedside manner, makes the bold compliment and comeback a catalyst. They're something between interesting strangers and fumbling childhood friends.

House rubs his right thigh. In this life it's not here fault, still the question's tinged with a deja vu-veiled guilt.

"What happened?"

"Interview at Princeton General." He knows she meant the leg.

"You got punched during an interview?"

"Punched, kicked, excommunicated."

She doesn't have to ask what he said to piss off the Chief over there. She knows he's a corrupt philanderer, a bad doctor at best. She wants to reminisce, say 'Still getting into fistfights?' but she can't assume what he'll remember, or what he won't. Unsure what to say next, she lets House fill the silence.

"Really Lise, you look good." A beat.

"How long are you in Princeton?"

"My plane leaves in less than an hour. Why?"

Why? Because she has the prospect of another promotion approaching and he's maimed, unemployed––she wants to help him as much as she wants him.

"I might be able to get you an interview here. We need a new instructor in Nephrology."

It doesn't bother him that she somehow knows his specialty. That she's aware of his reputation, and remembers, turns him on even more.

"Would you be willing to teach, work the clinic when needed?"

"Those who can't do..." He murmurs sardonically. Then he blinks and nods, acknowledging the opportunity.

"I'll make a few calls."

"Thank you," escapes under his breath as her heels echo on the way out.

"Tomorrow at one," she tells him after ten minutes, sticking her head in through the exam room door and pulling it back out before he can respond.

-

House misses his flight, reluctant to reschedule and promising himself that he'll see her again before he leaves.

When he checks into a hotel that night, he's already finished the vicodin prescription she wrote him earlier that day, chasing the last of it with bourbon.

It's been too long to be a coincidence but instead of sentiment he's only filled with resentment, contempt, every loathsome emotion mounted atop his miserable self- disdain.

Now. Why did they have to meet now? He's an unemployed cripple and she's running a department. She is who she's always wanted to be. And he's just alone. Frustrated, he drops the bottle and sprawls across the bed.

He wants to go back. He wants to stay. He wants them both to be the same.

Painless, still thinking of her, he closes his eyes and drifts finally into a dream where yesterday's not so far away.


	2. Three Seasons pt1

**three seasons **(part1)

The blue mailbox mocked him.

Ohio suburbs pitifully supplanted the adventure of Europe, Egypt and Japan with an intolerable boredom. Half the world had been home for House, but this, his hometown, seemed such a cruel misnomer. He'd only lived here for sixteen months after being born and the self-contained, government-subsidized towns, the conformist mission of a military base, was all he knew.

Life as a civilian was already a broken promise. He knew it couldn't last. John was on leave for the first time in years. But it would be temporary. His father always talked about the old Dutch colonial on Baker Street. Blythe hoped they'd buy it, settle, stay. So did Greg in a separate way, knowing as well as them that this would never be home.

There were white shutters and a white fence, white wicker chairs on the front porch. It was a plain place, on an ordinary block. House had turned fifteen a week before they left Okinawa. The baraku revelation was nearly a year behind him and his unwavering quest, his obsession with being the best, was the one constant, the only progress.

He'd started shaving by then, however unnecessarily, and an impressive stack of printed pornography had survived the three moves since he started collecting. With a breadth of experiences unmatched by most teenagers, he finally looked like most, having outgrown the militant buzzcut and escaped the base barbershop. The duty-roster on the refrigerator was getting easier to ignore and commander-conducted room inspections were useless since he had no intention of unpacking.

With the start of summer he was starting all over again. Still wearing a Pacific tan, his fear of friendships kept him reclusive the first few weeks. A stagnant restlessness, to be fifteen––too young to drive, too old for Saturday morning cartoons. House aspired for both though, his permit bound to become a license and the TV his cathode ray companion.

His room had a view but the brick chimney next door obscured the blue sky. The second story blocked the sunset. So he'd stare at the obstacle with scrutinizing curiosity, wondering about his neighbors; the cracks in their sidewalk, the breed of dog he heard barking, the blood red American beauties blooming behind that white picket barrier. The mailbox standing solitary as the first thing he saw he would soon discover belonged to an imperturbable bookworm.

_**summer(time)**_

A prodigal delinquent, House slept in every day that summer.

Every day except for one.

July arrived bright and early and with an insomniac's energy he rolled out of bed, bored enough that morning to canvas the small town.

Contingencies, such as they are, rarely eluded House. He expected the unpredictable, formulating his philosophy of chance with the combined logic of Murphy's Law and Occam's Razor. He knew that the sum of foresight and hope was disappointment and vowed to dispossess any expectations, accepting that there were only accidents and coincidences, cause and effect.

Everything happened for a reason, a rational, plausible reason. The explanation wasn't always conspicuous. It could be complex or convoluted, confusing as fate itself––but there were factors in the equation. The future was quantifiable.

That summer it was wide open. A blank page before him, the composition of kismet commenced with three contingencies.

The first was thirst.

The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, or more accessibly abbreviated,the A&P, was where House's parched palate led him the morning he didn't sleep in.

The architecture less memorable than the incident, a cupola and weathervane roof welcomed them both. The red brick finish a backdrop setting the first scene of their unsuspecting stumble into a lifelong and sometimes long distance relationship.

He passed her sweating indecisive at the cooler. It was she who saw him first, picking up a pack of firecrackers to ignite his patriotic pyromania. Something shone off the boy, more than the stained aura of a foreigner, and she looked on with uncritical fascination. She'd only seen him a few times the last weeks, taking the garbage out, running at night–– leaving footprints in the mud when the sprinklers came on. He was always in the dark or at a distance. Now they were close.

House turned toward her, one hand full of miniature dynamite, the other holding an orange Nehi. His approach made her drop the grocery list her mother had written.

Eye level with his sneakers as he ignored her and walked out, she thought he was unfriendly and antisocial, aloof but consistent. Fortunate enough to have dodged the disaster of gawking at more than the backs of his knees, she also had enough change to get a Yoohoo and carried it out with the half-full brown paper bag.

A few steps out the door, that contingent desire to quench her thirst took hold and the temptation of the cold drink in her hand was too much. She set the bag down and reached in her pocket––empty except for the crumbled, stepped-on store list and receipt. She tried twisting the cap off, but it was useless.

Out of sight on the outskirts of the street corner, House stood amused by her dilemma. After momentary deliberation, he walked over and gallantly, without a word, stretched out his hand offering her his bottle opener.

It was an antique, if not an artifact. Silver and simple, it was military issue and engraved in a different language. Though she couldn't tell which, she had the distinct sense she was holding a Soviet soldier's bar blade.

Whether it belonged to a commie or a kraut, it worked and she was immediately in the middle of a long relieved gulp. House sipped his soda and sighed, watching her. Their shadows danced tall and stiff, cast sharp on the blazing concrete.

She smiled a satisfied saccharine smile, with chocolate traced lips curved so sincere it almost made him smile. They were still strangers, still kids, with no idea that this summer would mean everything.

Blushing, she handed the bottle opener back. The humidity had her hair damp and the temperature, rising with the fated first acquaintance, was making her sweat more. The color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong pump of her young heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood––she was thirteen years old.

"Thanks," said the grateful girl, pausing after the beat of brushing fingers.

House nodded, stealing another swig of longneck nostalgia.

"You moved in next to me. I'm Lisa."

"Cuddy," she formalized the introduction.

"I know."

The door of the store opened with a chime and Cuddy turned to see who it was, using the diverted glance to think of what to say to the quiet stranger.

"How do you like your new––?" She started, and he was expecting her to charm him with the double entendre of 'house, House.' But when she looked back he was already gone.

The avoidance of an actual conversation House justified by convincing himself of their incompatibility. She was younger than him. A discerning and judgmental upperclassman, he was a pariah, a reprobate, an outsider always.

He needed few and liked no one.

But the island yearned for an atoll, or at least an inhabitant. Which is why he was afraid she was different.

He had a sense of this difference from the start. It was a sense all resistance could never completely eclipse. He trudged on alone and avoidant a few more days, determined to decipher her motives and history. The desire to impress her should they meet again was motivation, but not the only one.

Curiosity––why she was the first and only one brave (or stupid) enough to talk to him, that was what he intended to investigate. The anomaly of her approach, the readiness of the attraction, House wondered too long about, rereading his library of Conan Doyles––turning the torn and frayed pages, content to have his own three pipe problem.

_**spectacle to debacle**_

The second contingency was communal celebration.

While other people's parents were derailing their domestic complacency by attending key parties, the Cuddys were organizing a block party. Mother Helen was a school teacher and had the entire PTA participating. Dad Andrew, the pediatrician, promised all his patients cake and ice cream.

House awoke knowing there was no escape from the cookout. It had been widely advertised, the new family invited and a certain commitment, the burden of being in this zip code awaited.

Flammability, fat thighs sticking to folded chairs and flags waving with a proud fury so it had arrived: the Fourth of July.

The subtle wind wafted the smell of charcoal and burnt ground beef. Cuddy was facing the fence, her stance hopeful. Trying to get a glimpse, she doubted that he would come out or come over. She didn't know he ready was, and looking over her shoulder.

After he made no appearance in the vertical peephole between posts, she turned around, reaching for the last hotdog. House swiftly lunged for and grabbed it before she could, biting off at least half, more than he could chew.

"Why'd you do that?" She asked infuriated.

"Because I could," House chomped with a messy mouthful.

He struggled a swallow. Then,

"You should be thanking me. I just saved you from sinning," he hissed, sarcasm as mustard on his lips.

"What?"

It took her a moment to realize he had successfully deduced she was Jewish.

"We don't keep kosher. And I'm _hungry,_" complained Cuddy.

As he called her a hypocrite, she reached for a cupcake instead. Swiping icing off the top she licked her fingertip and looked away, irritated as much as intrigued. He took another bite and considered. The juxtaposition of residences was the extent of their relationship. They weren't being forced to be friends. Conversation was a choice. This was all in their control. Impersonating an adult, he accepted his adolescent autonomy, straightened his shoulders and wiped his face.

"Looks like they're putting more on the grill," he mumbled. Cuddy looked

at him then turned to see John House in a camouflage apron and fatigues flipping burgers and juggling buns.

"See you later," he stammered low, not quite meeting her eyes, as he tossed his paper plate in the trash.

He did see her later.

A pale promise amidst the gaussian ephemera of a hot summer day, she was wearing a red and white sundress with uncooperative spaghetti straps and ruffled trim. The ground was cool against her feet, spreading her sandalless toes as she sat, tickled by the uneven blades of grass. To him she was clover and crimson and ivory and even beneath the scorching exposure sun, he failed to find an imperfection.

An hour or more had passed and he'd dozed off, daydreaming. The unfinished gazebo in the Cuddys' backyard was where he was hiding now, slumped on the splintered bench. When he looked to the spot she was sitting earlier he found only the town's gray haired pastor. His eyes refocused to see familiar bare feet trotting toward him. Her braces had been removed four months earlier and she sauntered with straight teeth and a rare inertia of intent at an age of indifference. In the middle of that maladroit pubescent transition, she was anything but graceless.

In a moment Cuddy was standing in front of him, with tentative confidence she spoke: "A few of us are going to watch the fireworks up on the summit later, if you want to come."

She waited a long minute for a response, a red, white and blue popsicle rising with her wrist and dripping down the valleys of her knuckles. She brought it to her lips and tried to lick the syrupy tricolor as unprovocatively as possible.

The invitation caught House off guard. She had no reason to like him, no incentive for being nice. His lips parted but Blythe called for him to help carry the cooler inside before he could answer.

So he just nodded and sprinted away, knowing that with the invitation their rapport had evolved from arbitrary and nominal neighbors to prospective friends.

A melancholy stigma stalked close behind the misanthropic nomad. Cuddy saw it. He knew who he wasn't. The paternity deduction was three years past. He knew who he wanted to be, when he finally could. Who he was, House was still struggling with. Cuddy felt like she wanted to help him figure it out, if only to find out herself.

She heard John bragging about the medals Greg's grandfather earned waging world war against a fascist axis, exaggerating his own victories against VC and prophesying how Greg was supposed to continue the legacy of taking lives for the sake of freedom, that patriotic paradox of fighting for peace.

As the recitation tapered she saw her sister flaunting and flirting in a halter top and cut off blue jean shorts. Lindsey was House's age, and would be in his grade come September if she weren't enrolled at Hebrew school two towns over for her own transgressions. Despite all the hip swaying and hair flipping in her airspace, House ignored her, announcing his disinterest with an acerbic slur. It was Lisa who consumed his curiosity, the only Cuddy his senses craved. Covert yet, his infatuation remained.

The day passed with each in the other's periphery. Cuddy and her clique talked about the new kid on the block and he scowled at them, bored and relaxed in a lawn chair. Gossip segued into speculative conjecture and soon the teenage girls were spinning scenarios about his past as a military brat. In this life there'd be no Lucas to pull them apart and bring them together, just a peer pressuring tribunal to steal her and judge him. They deemed him different, failing to understand with their suburban prejudice against nonconformity. He was different and reclusive and Cuddy accidentally admitted she thought he was an interesting lunatic, concealing her burgeoning crush with a quick change in subject.

The rain came at dusk.

House had disappeared by then, wandering aimless and resolved to burn away the hope kindling in his heart.

A match flickered to life with a swift strike against the side of the pack. Firecrackers echoed bright and loud at his feet. Light and sound extinguished into darkness. He was in a parking lot at the bottom of the hill leading to the summit. Climbing doubtful, he made it to the top to see he was alone.

House sat, crossing his legs and feeling lost. Clouds hung in the sky, soon to be backlit by projectile pyrotechnics. Sighing, he realized his loneliness had been infiltrated by her invitation. A few minutes passed on the damp knoll and it gradually buried him: it was just another lie. Atop the sinuous cliff he was the butt of a joke, the girl next door never really meant––

The last light of day faded, girls voices rose. House, about to stand and start his dejected descent, reversed his direction and crawled frantically behind a tree wide enough for cover. Then he listened.

They were still talking about him; all superficial opinions of his appearance, his eccentricities and penchant for solitude. He scoffed that they had yet to encounter his ego. Their theories and plans for him were neither entertaining nor insulting. All their speculation rested on the assumption that he was staying and was easy to disregard. When he got bored with their inaccurate musings about life as a mobile Marine boy, he tried to squat and tiptoe out but stepped on twigs or litter or a foley stage full of sound effect props and the suspect sound halted their conversation. They were already certain he was a spy, an emissary sent to steal their virginity and burn down their churches, so he sat, settled and overlapped his feet on the slippery trunk of an ancient chestnut.

A spectator under the circumstances, he waited more a witness, watching her watch the fireworks.

The air was thin, a humid breeze raised goosebumps across his skin. He felt like something impossible was about to begin.

The sound of footsteps drew closer in from the path. Cuddy turned to see who was coming. Expectation sank with a sigh the moment she saw it wasn't House. She leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a strand of hair blew errant, but she didn't blink. In the briefest pout of honest disappointment, illuminated by an instant of kaleidoscopic clarity, he saw what they could be–– their future, their history, love at spectral sight.

A girl on a hilltop; credulous, hopeful, she waited with the patient ache of expectant youth, shining with the same deceivingly infinite scope as the spectacle painting the sky. Crickets crooned their nightsong and the blasts ebbed intermittent, the colors dissolving into the cobalt and alabaster of a July twilight.

The girls dragged their feet home, yawning, drowsy juvenalia with sunburned shoulders.

House leaned against the tree, closed his eyes and for the first time, longed to never leave.

-

The third contingent vision was born out of investigative convenience.

House justified his voyeurism by calling it cynicism. He was fishing for some flaw, a reason to reject the reality of the possibility of her liking him.

What he found were breasts, with room to grow: the younger sister next door in a bathing suit and perfecting her breaststroke.

The Cuddys had the luxury of a pool in their backyard and Lisa split her spare summer time between swimming practice and tennis lessons.

Pretending to replace the chain on his bike and trying to finish his Nehi before it got warm, he watched through the fence. When she got out of the pool he began cranking again, but never stopped paying attention.

She stepped into the grass, over forgetmenots and on dandelions, reaching for a dry towel on the porch banister. Midway through her journey, House looked away out of fear that his peeping pupil might be conspicuous. Then he heard a gasp catch in her throat and looked to see her reaching for her foot, about to lose her balance, choking on a sob. She stood on one leg hopping onto the cement, biting her lip before sitting, and cursing.

House knew what had happened.

In an instant he was there, looming above her wriggling toes before she could look up. The expression on his face wasn't panic, though it wasn't recognizable as sympathy or concern either. She stared confused a second as he reached into his pocket then sat beside her.

"Let me see," he insisted, prying the tweezers from his Swiss army knife. His voice was calm, certain, almost mature. She trusted him.

Cuddy conveyed that trust by reluctantly straightening her leg, leaving the heel of her foot on the edge of his thigh. He stared admiringly at her shins, feigning disgust in touching her grass coated foot. As if he were a practicing podiatrist, he examined it, his thumb brushing lightly over the tense ball and up the arch, relaxing, almost tickling, gauging her reaction to his touch. Finally he found the wasp stinger and squinted, anticipating his next advance.

"You have nice knees," he proffered to distract her. It worked, she was too nonplussed by the compliment to cringe or pull away when his wrist twisted and with a sharp pinch the stinger was removed.

Cuddy's eyes squeezed shut as a delayed response then reopened relieved. House put his knife away and she retracted her leg, whispering 'Thanks' as she stood and limped to the pool.

Putting her sore foot in the water, she sat on the tiled ledge. House rolled up his jeans, slid off his sneakers and sat beside her. She smelled like chlorine and Coppertone and his first chance. Birdsong underscored a chorus of lawnmowers, a 747 soared overhead. Cuddy sat placid and unsuspecting.

When he saw the pain had subsided, he leaned over, nonchalantly stretching his arm behind her then, with a brisk nudge, pushed her into the water.

Tactless and transparent, he might as well have been pulling her pigtails or proposing marriage. The object of his affection would be the recipient of his deflection, a pawn or a player, in the fixed game of transience and attraction.

"Greg! Why––?" She gurgled, the burn of warm water rushing up her nose and down her throat. She knew because he could was the only motive he'd admit. So she simply retaliated, drenching him in an armlength wave, then splashing and giggling. The hair on his skinny legs was blond and his wet jeans unrolled back down black. His stoic expression finally broke. It was the first time she saw him smile.

Cuddy smiled because he was smiling, because the ice had been broken and they were submerged and swimming in the tepid water beneath it. She smiled and swam and splashed. They chased circles in an energetic attempt to drown each other, until somebody called her name. It was Helen. Cuddy turned to see her with a mixing bowl against her hip, a spoon in her hand and a pencil behind her ear. Baking cookies and grading papers, she'd be first female principal before Cuddy graduated and a maternal model she could never live up to (or ever stop trying).

Her mother's interruption was intended to be only that because when Cuddy looked back House was gone and all Mrs. Cuddy said in her detention-wielding tone was "Come inside."

"I don't want you seeing that boy anymore. He's nothing but trouble."

Still drying her ears and too tired from the sun and being stung to argue, Cuddy bowed her head and listened. Her mental monologue defended him, but with her mom there was no use, once she judged someone, they were condemned to her declaration of delinquency. Cuddy heard 'vagabond' and 'corrupt' and all the threats her mother had probably had patented in the last thirteen years.

Never before had Lisa, the good one, been so tempted to disobey. She wanted to start an affair, break the law, commit every crime and pen their love story through her incarceration.

Overtly she complied. Secretly, she started planning their wedding.

-

Summer shined on through August and House became a bully, then a nuisance. Tormenting and berating her at every opportunity, his pranks were exasperating but harmless. She endured them, suspecting what he was doing: dealing with unfamiliar emotions as he refused to grow attached (or grow up).

If the Cuddys left en masse, House would sneak over and swim in their pool,

clever enough to never leave wet footprints or any other evidence of his trespassing. Until. Cuddy heard the cautious slow whoosh of waves as he hurried out of the water one evening, underwater deaf when the garage door opened.

Rather than confront him straightforward, she devised a way to make his intruder reveal an act of revenge. She stretched a trip wire along the handles halfway down the diving board. Then she stayed home the next day and waited.

Gray clouds passed and the sun came out. House made his entrance as soon as her father's station wagon was a block away. He cannonballed into the deep end and waded a while to cool off. When he decided to try a dive, Cuddy crouched in the shadows trying to suppress her anticipatory burst of laughter. Almost regret, adoration rose at the sight of his bronze skin and strong body as he got a running start down the plank, speeding up only to trip and fall into a bellyflop.

His head rose confused a moment later. He saw her standing with a satisfied smirk and was thoroughly impressed by the reciprocity of the prank.

He reached for his towel and muttered "Nice." She was a wily adversary, a matched opponent. He lost this round. And he deserved it. House shrugged and shook water out of his ear, turning toward home defeated with a bright pink stomach. Cuddy panicked, she didn't want him to leave.

"Stay!" she shouted quickly. "If you want."

He turned back and complied, wishing he could tell her it was all he ever wanted.

After he knew he was found out, House would come over when Cuddy was swimming, uninvited and in trunks. He half hoped his presence would get her in trouble, give her an excuse to hate him, proving she was no different than everybody else.

But the pitch of Helen's voice carried from a distance and House could run then, swift out of the pool and over the fence. Once Cuddy had to hold his head under the water and hide him behind her, smiling innocently through her mother's interrogation. The unintentional intimacy elevated the relationship they had no idea would endure. As he rose, House discovered a mole on her shoulder blade. It would remain an anomaly of her anatomy he always wanted to examine it closer.

Neither lascivious nor erotic, but admiringly objective, the geography of her body he longed to explore, one day; though he knew it would only ever be someday.

A thin veneer of shyness still sheltered her confidence, it was all he wanted to strip away. The buoyancy of her beauty softened his perception. He had been stung smitten the same as her and the venom coursing through his body was poison hope.

Eventually they scheduled their swim dates when Helen was tutoring the scholastically inept at summer school or her father was in his study or performing an appendectomy.

She counted off laps while he floated lazily with the current, shutting his mind off to any thought other than this serene suburbia, where the sun splattered through tall trees and reflected off of rows of mailboxes. They splashed and laughed, dove and lolled sustaining the illusion of time standing still even as the short season slipped away.

For weeks they were young drifters, home beneath the azure sky, alone except for each other.

House knew his strategy had failed miserably. As much as he tried to disguise it, his crush was consuming and his obligatory offenses diminished. If House was Holmes, inadvertent as inevitable had he found his Irene Adler.

In a constant state of adaptation, like the boy himself, his emotions changed––from curiousness, a proximity infatuation, to something more abstract, more ambitious.

Greg House was falling in love.

The struggle to stay on his feet he surrendered, embracing the vertigo and almost ready to admit it, if not to her then to himself. The closest he came to audible articulation was the day he replaced the strings on his acoustic guitar. A melody came to him and he strummed forlornly. Then suddenly he remembered a few lines borrowed from Byron (and Bob Dylan). A stanza short of being a sonnet, he'd never call it a poem, instead assigning chords to the meter and making the semantic distinction between poetry and lyrics.

Cuddy had her own introspective expression, a diary disguised as just another notebook. It was in a way, the subject less studied than world history, it chronicled her experiences, her hopes and hurt; their history.

Their gravest worries were mutual: that the unrequited love would always be.

Before their feelings became more than scribbled hopes or unsung serenades, the inevitable happened.

They were caught.

They had been discreet and quiet and careful. But Lindsey confirmed her suspicions, discovering a Nehi bottlecap one day and knowing her sister hated the stuff.

The cap alone wasn't enough, she wanted to catch them in the act. The next day she came home early to find House peeling freckles from her sister's' shoulder, sitting poolside a tanned pair.

At first Lindsey used her knowledge to blackmail her little sister, pulling on her heartstrings and manipulating her like a marionette. Soon enough though, she realized Lisa's error could distract their parents from her own misdeeds and she told them.

Cuddy was grounded and House's parents warned to keep the miserable boy away from their baby girl. Familial interference would be the first chasm to come between, but not the last.

_**interlude**_

Weeks passed. The advent of academia became unavoidable. House was a sophomore, a condescending stranger in a new school. Cuddy was still stuck in junior high. Prisoners in separate but adjacent buildings, they never saw each other on campus.

Or at home.

House could finally afford his first motorcycle and Cuddy turned fourteen. He filled the void of her giggling with the rev of a throttle. He'd see her get off the schoolbus sometimes and was certain and relieved, hoping he'd finally succeeded in making her hate him. She'd lost her parents' trust and was no longer guileless little Lisa.

Adding to the dissonance of distance, he missed their illicit rendezvous. Her innocence complemented his indolence. As anticlimactic and frustrating as summer was, she was truly his friend now. The novelty, hostility, forbiddeness––Cuddy missed them as much. How he had become a lovelorn Romeo and Cuddy a Capulet, neither could explain.

Grateful he'd dodged the tragedy of the final act, House failed at forcing indifference.

Cuddy was no less confused. Her feelings clouded in the weeks without him. No male had ever emerged from the mass. Until House. Exasperating and offensive, but honest, he breached the social contract and became more than a neighbor, more than the new boy on the block, more than anyone before.

The irony of his arrogance was that he earned it. His intelligence was a handicap, coupled with his narcissism. He alienated all those around him, ostracized himself but chose her.

In their first interim, in the absence of each other, this choice was the only truth they could consider.

-

The end of Indian summer waned week by week. A portentous chill hovered in the atmosphere, like a dismal guarantee of a long cold winter.

House had his first bike accident, leaving him uninjured but wheelless a while. He suffered through the two mile walk home rather than enduring the bright yellow and claustrophobic bus ride. He'd made adversaries of teachers and a friend of a gullible Junior with a Chevy, Dylan Crandall. Crandall wasn't in class this week though, he had mono. An unappreciative Greg assured him that he deserved it for believing that his last girlfriend didn't cheat, frustrated his own cynicism and doubt would never wear off on his buddy.

House had annoyed and insulted every athletic entourage (from the girls' volleyball team to the touchdown scoring quarterback) out of anger with his own exclusion. There was no lacrosse at this school, and he'd missed tryouts for cross country.

So he scuffed his feet, with his collar flipped up, slumped and dispirited as he carried his books, until he was cornered on the street corner. Philip, a runningback whose small testicles House vocally (and accurately) diagnosed as being symptomatic of steroid use in the locker room after Phys. Ed. a few days before, cracked his knuckles. He wasn't alone. House shrugged at the moronic wall of muscle blocking him, trying to appear undaunted. A hulking tight end shoved him. Phil called him a fag, and a few other things, for staring at other guys' balls.

House puckered his lips in disdain. He had a high tolerance for pain and they had an overt homophobia he couldn't help but exploit.

"Right. You're always surrounded by a squadron of jockstraps but _I'm_ the gay one."

His comeback was quickly retorted with a punch in the face, and another. With the third blow, Phil's class ring caught on the bridge of House's nose, tearing. Then it was all nails and fists and knees––into his ribs and back and temple. Somebody clenched his collar, their clasp the only thing that was keeping him on his feet.

"Stop it!" A voice interrupted before they could drop him to the pavement.

"Let him go," demanded Cuddy.

"_Now_ Phil or I'll tell my parents what you and my sister were doing behind the bleachers Friday night."

Phil's grip loosened. House's feet flattened as the team walked away, their assault incomplete. Cuddy stood with her arms crossed, making sure they didn't look back. After an unsteady stagger, House collapsed.

He was bruised and bloody when she looked down at him, stretching out her hand to help him stand. He rose heavy and she held his shoulders as he stepped on her toes. The fierce glint of tears threatened in the corners of his eyes, less from pain than battered pride.

He blinked and arched his brows, backing away.

"Why'd you do that?" He asked.

"Because I could," she answered, wry and bright, adding new meaning to the remembered words.

A smirk crooked watching her silhouette in the September sunset. No angel, the undeserving atheist knew she was an ally.

"C'mon," she said. "I know a shortcut."

The shortcut ended up being anything but. He followed her without protest or complaint though, the dull ache becoming eagerness, and fear at where this was all going. She led him to the end of the block, behind the post office and down old slanted steps to a dirt path. Kicking loose leaves, House rubbed his grazed chin, wondering how all the aggression and angst had somehow transmuted into affection with a single defensive act. They were betrothed now, he thought. He owed her more than he could ever repay.

The restless rustling of denim was the only sound as their bodies touched, pacing close on the narrow trail. Reunited, he was rescued, and almost ready to tell her, tell her everything, if it would change anything––

"So Phil and your sister hump on a regular basis?" He asked, to jar himself out of the immobility of emotion.

"Yeah," she answered.

It didn't seem that long ago that she was her sister's best friend. Maturity was like a bolster between them; Cuddy had no idea how it went from Barbies to birth control in the blink of eye. So, with a perplexed aggravation she shook her head and added:

"I don't get it."

"What? Sex?"

"That, and _them_ and why people are so..._blinded_ by a biological impulse that their self control ceases to exist."

"The parts fit," he said matter of factly, proud of how simple and true and right it was. People were puzzle pieces, life was only a matter of connecting the corresponding shapes and seeing the whole picture.

He considered extending the conceit, letting the metaphor wax brilliant and sink to a depth that permeated her opinion of him. Instead of talking, he just stopped walking. They were half a mile in, in wooded seclusion and electric silence. House scratched the dried red line along his jaw, staring at the pond they were approaching. The water was raw blue verging on violet, a color he'd never seen before and was sure he'd never see again.

House felt it evanesce; the beauty, the place, the tantalizing hint of happiness. For this moment he could just stand still and she would stand by him.

"You like me," he decided to interrupt the too peaceful quiet. "Why?"

"House," she sighed, not willing or wanting to deny it.

"Because––you're bleeding!" Cuddy cringed as her voice quavered.

Fresh blood dripped from the gash in his nose down the slope of his cheek. She reached into her backpack but could only find a white gym shirt to wipe the blood away. A rough game of dodgeball, she contrived as an excuse for when her mother found the shirt in the laundry later that week.

Now she chose to risk suspicion. Their eyes locked entangled, her thumb lingered, led to the corner of his rapt and ready mouth.

Her touch reached him, revealed to him that Lisa Cuddy was and always would be a crux, a cure, a contradiction. A paradox, permanent and passing, that instant became a stain, a brand, a scar on his soul. House's voice fell low and he bent as he clasped her wrist, whispering something she couldn't hear over the relentless pounding of her heart. Then relief when their young lips met, her lashes fluttering against his cheek, his hand on the small of her back. There was no intent and no resistance, just the indissoluble mixture of irony and opportunity, like atoms fused and inseparable, elementally triumphant.

The taste was dark and sweet––chocolate, and the strawberries of her lip gloss; the flavor like youth itself, fleeting, lost, before it could ever be realized. Cuddy curved in closer to him with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love and he was grateful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her gray green eyes.

With a breathless sway they parted, breaking the kiss but not their concentration. She looked at him, his arm still around her waist. His hair was tousled, his clothes torn. House was dirty and weary and damaged. Her head tilted toward the magnetism of their potential, the temptation to continue, to kiss again and again. Inexperience pummeled her audacity and she stood speechless and motionless another moment with his index finger bent in her belt loop.

"In the winter the pond freezes," she said, staring at the sienna sun setting slowly behind the trees. He finally let go.

"When I was younger me and my sister would skate here...until she broke her ankle."

House was staring at the water again, his lips wet, his head throbbing.

"Maybe this year...we could..." She started, about to make a date House knew he couldn't keep. His reticence unnerved her. There was the caught feeling again, that she'd done something wrong––or worse, that she'd disappointed him.

He bent down to pick up the blood stained tshirt that she dropped in the middle of the kiss. "Thanks," he said and it was enough to alleviate her irrational anxiety.

With a susceptible spirit, House bent down again, picking up a pebble and tossing it across the water to watch it ripple and reflect like a mirror at his feet. It was the last time he let himself pause to appreciate it all.

They started walking again, a wordless promenade, brushing hands and in no hurry home.

At the end of the creek was a gorge and a makeshift wooden bridge that they crossed to find themselves just below Cuddy's backyard and beside an abandoned tire swing. She took his hand over slippery rocks and through a patch of quicksand. The chance to turn around, to run away, grow up and never look back infiltrated all other plans, every contingency that led to that connected moment. He looked down before taking a leap and saw her tepid tips of fingers and pink painted nails. She was still holding his hand.

Never let go, he told himself.

For twenty years he's been holding on to that memory, that place, that girl he's finally found again.

-


	3. Three Seasons pt2

Thank you for your reviews so far, I've not left any A/Ns because will only let me edit this in html and I fail at html.

So I'd just like to say that this is my first AU, and more personal than most fic I post online.

Thank you for any feedback and for reading. I hope you enjoy the rest!

-

_**three seasons**_ (part2)

The black and blue and burgundy fistprints on House's face and body faded with the beauty and brevity of the last falling leaves. The season's change was a conduit. Autumn arrived early and passed fast.

The month of October stands out as a highlight in his recollection. It was contrast: frost and sunshine, a thawed glimpse at a frozen opportunity. It was when he heard John announce his next assignment and when he started counting the days until he had to leave. It was the last time he called her Lisa and the first time he felt her pain, a fraction of what he'd inflict.

Their place by the pond they met most days, making it their own modest utopia––no place they'd ever have again. They studied and talked. He taught her to cheat and let her borrow his textbooks to have already memorized the answers in the back by the time she took the class.

Their library lay beneath a chestnut tree and the excuse to see each other was never so justified or unquestioned. Their motives, more chemical than academic, still contained a sort of genuine innocence, despite their mutual quest to lose it.

House rarely mentioned the places he'd lived before, except to complain how boring Baker Street was in comparison. His laconic prudence was bolstered by his determined attempt to not reveal any clues of his next move as much as he wanted, at least subconsciously, to not acknowledge a life before Lisa Cuddy.

Their unorthodox relationship was no longer a secret. 'Your girlfriend' was what Blythe and Crandall called her but House denied it, plucking pedals from a wildflower and debating with crossed legs under the chestnut, whether or not they were right.

Cuddy contemplated kissing him again and studied his anatomy more than any printed diagram. Unkempt, always, his ears protruded from an uncombed cut. The shadow of a beard became apparent if she leaned close, his tongue red, lips sticky from the cherry lollipop he'd pickpocketed from the town pharmacy. His eyes saw through her but never past her. Between them was a scab from the gash the jock's ringed fist left.

She decided then that he was going to be more attractive scarred.

Friendship matured into flirtation, with hopeful intimations of romance. Not all chemical reactions were hormonal. A pile of polaroids cluttered Cuddy's desk. She found herself compulsively taking pictures, seeking tangibility––proof of those rare and brief and beautiful moments when Greg House was to her somebody he could never be to another soul.

House knew all he had was his intellect. No charm, no chance, just answers. To her his tenth grade wisdom was hypnotic; he was easily the smartest of her peers.

He told her the baraku story, never letting on the absolute severity of its impact but hinting in a way only she could detect and quietly confessing his calling.

His conspiracy to outwit kismet, escape a military fate, become a doctor detective, to diagnose, deduce and be needed, she understood. More simpatico than clairvoyance, she had a clear vision of him, older and taller with a stethoscope around his neck and a chart under his arm and, for some reason, never in a lab coat.

He had the same sort of intuitive foresight about her, critiquing the caduceus she doodled in the margins of her notes.

They shared this much, their purpose in medicine, administration and mysteries without knowing the exact details of discontinuity.

If they did speculate about their futures, they were tacitly intertwined, connected to this inseverable link to the past, which was their present. Not that they could express or imagine how, just that both believed, against all logic, that they would remain together indefinitely.

They never kissed again. The milestone was mentioned on occasion. Once, House asked if he was her first. Only out of sudden insecurity did Cuddy nod.

On the happiness scale, the needle peaked. The kiss was incredibly exponentially impossible to repeat, and every other moment an elevated eleven.

As the temperature fell they met less often. House's presence was still forbidden within the perimeter of 219 Baker St. Halloween approached with the promise of incalculable candy consumption. Though he was too old to trick or treat, House still anticipated turning a few kids upside down and the age old explanation of an eighteen egg omelet for when Blythe asked where all her eggs went.

But tragedy struck before any havoc was wreaked. Pebbles, the Cuddys' German shepherd, was hit by a car. Lisa witnessed the accident. Having just changed out of her costume, she was standing by the door, watching her friends circle the block with sacks full of refined sugar.

The brakes wailed––fifty feet too late. Tire tracks burned into the gravel. The sound of the impact was a dull thud and muffled canine sigh. Still in shock, she rushed out and collapsed in the middle of the street, lifting the dog's lifeless head and repeating her name, clinging to the collar, devastated as the animal died in her arms.

House heard the collision but didn't investigate until later.

The blood stained asphalt was a mosaic of grays, a black puddle coagulating in the center. He passed it disaffected, deciding to bring an offering of consolatory candy corn. He had no idea what to say or if she even wanted to see him. Yet something compelled him to knock anyway, his only expectation to be ignored or turned away by her parents. Andrew answered the door and before he could say a word, Cuddy's dejected silhouette darted away, out the door, past House and down the hillside. She ran in the dark and he followed her blindly.

At the bottom she paced frantically until his arms were around her and nothing between them but the frozen vapor clouds of their winded breaths. The hold he had on her was more than a hug; the certainty of his stance exceeded solace and compassion, it was unwavering and fearless, a refusal to back down, back away or let go.

She wept violently, from anger to acceptance, lost but not alone in a tumult of bereavement.

.

When at last the crying started to cease, he kept on holding her, through the whimpering shudder of those post-sobbing hiccups children get. Cuddy wiped her nose with her jacket sleeve and a slow epiphany came upon him: they still _were _kids. She was the naive girl next door, ambitious, heartbroken, with baby teeth biting her quivering bottom lip.

House saw the woman she would be, even as the child she was closed her eyes and hid her face against his damp shoulder. Both knew words were meaningless so they sat silent and close until the moonlight faded and nothing remained but a solitary star in the sky, like an asterisk leading to some undiscoverable footnote––the frustrating convolution of their lonely futures.

He walked her home hoping the salt of her tears might preserve the memory and feeling, save what they remember as closeness and not catastrophe.

-

After that night, House was allowed inside her home; a relief when he was left to sleep on the grass or denied dinner for getting home five minutes too late. Lisa Cuddy was reward and refuge enough, the highlight of an otherwise arbitrary stint in this ordinary town. Andrew even offered to let him shadow at his practice when Cuddy boasted about House's affinity for physiology. Then he almost blurted it brutally, honestly––his eventual evacuation. Quick, he winced, biting his tongue, incapable still yet of seeing her hurt, of making her suffering his fault.

_**inexplicable**_

The unfinished gazebo in Cuddy's backyard became their place when it was too muddy, or dreary to hike to the pond. They'd sit in the shadows, stare at the sky and connect constellations, trying to tell the difference between shooting stars and satellites. The impalpable iridescence of the moon, hovering on the cusp of winter, intensified the feeling that they had found each other from across the universe; starcrossed and together in spite of statistics, in spite of the science they'd pursue, swear allegiance to. These last days were defiance of the logic that would define them.

If Cuddy fell asleep, he'd brush his lips across her delicate cheeks and cover her with his leather jacket, counting in the clear darkness, always counting, the days, the hours, what little time they had left.

-

On her backporch they sat one day after school, sipping cider and cocoa. Nature was celebrating autumn's exit with mad ecstasy. The cloudless sky was a deep azure, the sun warm, the day committed so gloriously to memory that rain or pain or distance would never mar.

She sat a step below him, resting her head on his knee.

"It's supposed to snow soon," she said drowsily. "It usually does by Thanksgiving."

"Not enough for a snow day before break," he assured the back of her head.

Cuddy sat up, turned to face him.

"No, but the water's usually frozen enough to skate on by the time

it's covered in snow."

The first day of winter was less than a week away. The start of their third season, he sighed a frustrated curse to himself. Less than a year––it wasn't fair, he could never stay anywhere for twelve measly months.

"It's not yet, I checked. But maybe by next week," continued Cuddy, casually ascending to his step.

"Maybe," he lied. Because in this life there'd be no lake they'd escape to for spring break, just a pond they could never ice skate on. Prescience or pessimism, somehow he knew this much, without knowing how or why.

"Greg," she started tentative and with a sudden tone of maturity.

Something had shifted. It made the knot in his stomach sink and the lump in his throat rise.

"What are we?"

His lips parted and he had a mental aside, wondering when the epitome of timidity had become so bold as to confront the brash enigma with the question of their status––and how to avoid answering.

"You're asking because you want to do with me what you sister has been doing with Phil Weber, and Chris Hewitt. And most of the offensive line."

A beat. Cuddy's cogent scale tipped in the direction of denial, but before she could refute his accurate accusation:

"You're insecure. You shouldn't be. You've got––"

"Don't do that!" She cut him off.

"Don't try to dissect me. I don't want you analyzing the _reason_ why when I'm trying to ask you a serious question. I just want you to answer me."

"You can't always get what you want," he reminded.

"Don't deflect either."

"What do you think we are?"

"You're answering a question with a question," she told him through gritted teeth.

"What's it matter what I think? _I_'m the one who asked _you_."

"I'm curious," he brooded, begging his brain for a heart's epiphany.

"And," the slow drawl of his voice stalled.

"It matters because if this _is_ anything,," tactfully evading the word relationship.

"It's only what two individuals perceive it to be. What we want it to be."

House felt older all of a sudden, and was afraid what he said meant more to him than it did to her.

"You think you're being objective," Cuddy countered. She chastised herself for expecting anything more than this evasion symptomatic of an acute allergy to admitting his feelings.

"But you're really just being an ass."

Something pulled at her behind her breastbone, nudging and tugging and telling her House was right. The flaw in intimacy was subjectivity. She was the one trying to quantify and define what they were. The indefinite, the fear and doubt bothered her more than him. And that bothered her worst of all.

She knew she'd get no straight answer, which was answer enough. What they had, undefinable or unusual, was better than the convention of going steady. It was, the thought came and passed quick, better than the shallow superficiality of the whitest wedding. So she let it rest and veered off on another tangent.

"Science doesn't have to be soulless," she insisted, canting her head philosophical.

"Nobody can be completely rational. And we _must_ be more than molecular."

"You can't prove that we're any more than flesh and blood and bone and brains––

So why believe we're more?"

"Because you feel it."

"You want to believe––"

"No. I want to feel. _Something_. Something that hasn't been researched and studied––deciphered or dissected. Something there isn't even a word for, something nobody has ever felt before..."

Caught up in the sentiment of her conviction, she left the thought unfinished. She already felt it. What Cuddy wanted to say was that she didn't want to feel it alone anymore. She wanted him to acknowledge that he felt it, that he wanted to feel it, forever and with her, only her.

House wanted to fight, say that there's no such thing as love, that it's only a matter of chemistry and psychology, a biological incentive, an idealized lie that keeps the human race from extinction. But he couldn't.

Lisa was love, love like a freight train barreling through his ventricles toward his destination heart. All love derails, he told himself. This love had no brakes and the momentum was magnetic––

House's need to make the emotional mechanical was overwhelmed by the futility of arguing. His eyes wandered and his brain pandered. Impulse urged him to immediately change the subject––or else a unretractable proclamation might interrupt the comfortable taciturnity.

Mentally, he was groping for a metaphor.

What he felt, wanted, needed, it was all an incendiary illusion. And her gaze was like gasoline. The desire to set fire to reality was too much. He wanted to kiss her.

He always wanted to kiss her.

He swayed toward her a little, his hair falling into his eyes above a wry curl, the beginning of a grin. Their legs aligned. The space between them lessened. Then something rose and resisted. Against all his willingness, he withdrew. Standing, all too urgent, too wrong he spilled his mug. Cuddy stood a second later, the alternative sitting in a luke warm puddle.

"Sorry," he mumbled instead of the 'Damn it' he meant. He was pulling away and she didn't know why. Backwards down the steps, on the last he twisted his ankle and Cuddy could only stand without understanding and watch him limp home.

The next day her mind wandered and worried at school. What made him so nervous, so uncomfortable? Was there another girl––one in his own grade? What was House keeping from her?

Cuddy came home late after having missed the bus. Her dad informed her that House had just stopped by and left something in her room. She rushed to see nothing in particular. No roses, no candy, no burning bag of dog poop. So she shrugged and went downstairs, still uncertain where her and the arrogant aloof boy stood.

If they stood.

After dinner she returned to her room to homework and opened her desk drawer to have its upside down contents pour into her lap.

All anxieties were alleviated.

-

By then House had blackmailed his autoshop instructor and gotten his bike fixed. Most excursions he went alone, searching for an exception, an excuse, a way to stay. But permanence couldn't be caught or bought and he knew it'd never come to him.

The search ended abruptly at dusk curbside to a dark blue Joroleman. House parked and idled until the exhaust fumes made him cough. When he recovered she was standing beside him. Then, as if it was choreographed, rehearsed, staged every night the last few weeks, she straddled the seat, wrapped her arms around him and they were moving.

For the first mile she clung to him, close enough to feel his heart caged and drumming under his thick and zipped jacket. Close enough to see he wasn't sweating. She was safe, as long as she was with him. Then she relaxed, closed her eyes, brave or trusting enough to outstretch her arms, trying to take flight. She wanted to break free of this Ohio street, leave her family, her future, leave everything behind.

Beneath the fluorescent spill of spotlight streetlights they rode, alone together for what House feared would be the last time.

They arrived at the beginning.

The red brick of the A&P was a faded shade against the gray twilight, standing different and the same as two seasons before. He held the door open and they reminisced in the gesture. Summer seemed so far away.

Now they were different people as they went inside. They had changed. And, they had changed each other. He bought himself a Nehi and her one last Yoohoo, letting his thumb stroke her cold hand as he gave her the bottle opener before she could ask. They clanged their bottles together and meandered back outside, the starless sky an opaque witness of an inarticulate pair.

They were too young to say what they felt, to elope, escape, make it on their own;

too old to throw the tantrum that was building inside them, to let the unrequited anarchy manifest, initiate a tirade against this contingent injustice.

Stop sign and street light and a few miles home.

This was a true returning, to themselves and all their past and the encroaching presence of tomorrow. Nothing stood still. The last minutes and incandescent porchlight were a blur as House anchored his kickstand. The second she let go he was frozen lonesome. Out of the sudden sense of desertion he quickly got off, reaching and catching the length of her arm, for the unenduring honesty of contact.

Walking her to the door, he stared at his feet and the sidewalk and the way the wind blew dead leaves in the direction of his driveway. On her porch, Cuddy realized she still had his bottle opener. Her shivering hand offered it back to him.

"Keep it," he whispered, a kind of gentle regret in his voice.

Temporary. Cruel, meaningless, the word made his eyes well. House couldn't blink, waiting for her reaction. He never expected this to last forever. Or maybe he did. The hardest part was being forced to hurt the one person who wanted him, who trusted him. The one, the only one who loved him––he could feel her hand on his shoulder as she arched tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

Cuddy lingered reluctant and when he didn't kiss her back, or say anything, she just smiled and put the practical present in her pocket. House couldn't say it wasn't a bottle opener, that it was a piece of himself––the part pleading to not be forgotten.

She went inside unsuspecting, interpreting his sincerity as affection, a metallic endearment, a token to remember the night, this time in her life and not the parting gift it actually was.

_**fall(ing) out**_

The day came shortly after, bitter cold and bittersweet. Assailant time had led them to the attic. Cuddy snuck House in without her parents knowing, determined to give him something for the bottle opener, a tangible promise of possession.

Among his stoicism's many attributes was House's uncanny ability to disengage his conscious. That day mechanism that diluted guilt malfunction.

The smell of the wood varnish staircase was a sensory curtain opening on this final scene. On both sides of the wall there were family portraits, hung happiness, her batmizvah, her birthday and he didn't mock them. He envied them. The fourth of July awaited them at the top, reminding that the memory of a moment is but regret for every other. Even photographs are fleeting.

Cuddy turned an old skeleton key quietly and they went inside.

He perused the claustrophobic cube while she shut the door. Helen's wedding gown was hanging in the corner, beneath dust and cobwebs, among heirlooms and toys and the stockpile that stable immobile families have the privilege of collecting.

House wanted desperately to break the pattern of his life, escape the torture of transience.

Still in a state of juvenile denial, less at the prospect of seduction disintegrating than the loss of his first and last friend, he allowed his amorous psyche to distract him with the hope that she'd brought him here to do more than hold hands. A make out session was due, he rationalized and the thought of her wearing a strand of hickies under a turtleneck tomorrow made the first of these last minutes momentarily less grim.

Cuddy motioned him to come closer, signaling a vertical 'shhh' with her index finger across her lips. They were wet in the middle, chapped in the corners and he fixated on them, how he wanted to kiss them.

Goodbye.

He was still falling in spite of himself, his well-concealed arousal confined in corduroy pants, obsessed and depressed with all he was leaving behind.

The floorboards creaked when they took a step. Cuddy led them to a corner and slipped off her shoes, still sifting through storage. House sat on a crate, relieved they weren't supposed to make a sound because he had no idea what to say.

"I have something for you," she finally whispered. His heart leapt and plummeted at the implication of the keepsake he knew he wouldn't be able to keep. She was smiling, still searching, but smiling when she looked up at him. There was an expression on her face of understanding and sympathy, that obstinate optimism, the impression of youth and suffering side by side. He thought, 'she'll never be happy' and braced himself for the final slash to burst that scarcely created bubble.

The spine of the book was what he saw first.

Bell. _Manual of The Operations of Surgery._

"Here," said Cuddy handing him it.

She knew him too well. Knew that Holmes was Dr. Joseph Bell, knew that House was Holmes, that he'd be a doctor––

The book was an antique, her father's no doubt. Priceless and expensive

and his now.

Dizzy with guilt, House wanted to scream. Except he couldn't––talk or think or hope, lulled into numbness by the premonition of separation.

Railing against the tragedy, even as it unfolded, he felt his face grow pale and his pulse pound. "Cuddy––" he thought but it couldn't come out. He tried to neutralize the tremor in his throat by looking anywhere but at her face. The obligation to speak was on him but so was this dire gravitas, the enormous burden of what to admit.

Lisa. I Love You. I'm leaving.

"Lise," he found the courage to say, prepared in that instant to tell her everything.

Then suddenly the sound of footsteps ascending stairs. He stood quickly and pulled the chain on the lightbulb above them so that they were sitting in the dark except for a slant of blue light shining through a small triangular window.

They held their breath until a bedroom door shut and footsteps tapered back downstairs.

Cuddy sighed relief, warm against his neck. They were looking through the window. The icicles were still short, freezing along the gutters of the garage. The sun had almost set. November rain, shining wet, plashed into gleams under the rising moon.

It started to snow, somber and special, like pure white ephemera falling. There was a magic about watching the first flakes, the moment so easy to miss, that made the last months seem like a myth.

They sat silent, seeing the advent of a season, the pond finally frozen in the distance, the years that would pass and disappear between them. On this, the eve of the first day of the rest of their lives without each other, all he wanted was more time, and to tell the truth.

She leaned over and adjusted his collar; one side was sticking up. Without effort, she imagined the day she'd do it for him before work, when they'd sleep in the same bed and wake with matching gilded infinity on their fingers. House a husband, she laughed at the impossibility, filling the irresolute silence. Something was wrong.

She shivered, and House's hand let go of the book and found hers.

He couldn't thank her. Ingratitude was a thin veil. When their glances met she saw his chin was dominated by lines of pain around his mouth, forcing them up to his forehead and the corners of his eyes, like fear he never let be revealed before.

House was hurting, she knew.

He wanted to rest his head on her shoulder and confess it all, hide here or run away, forget his impostor father and the unfair tether that had made him another of time's captives. But it was she who leaned on him.

The feel of her head against his shoulder, the way her body had become familiar, fit perfectly along his, it sent a shock of emotion over him. His arm had a tendency to tighten around her, so he leaned back and tried and tried to think about anything but letting go.

"Do you like it?" She asked, looking down at the book. He nodded solemn, despising himself and held her a while longer. It was getting harder to resist an inexplicable kiss. He couldn't, not tonight, with no reason why. House shut his eyes, stifling the sentimental desire. When he opened them the interior was a dusky puzzle, the last pieces put together.

It was all before him: prom dress, stethoscope, wedding gown and cradle, like the life they could but would never have. Surrendering to the nearness, he leaned in and kissed the air above her hair.

The greatest mystery was to love and to be loved. House knew this now, as much as he knew that knowing wasn't enough.

"I have to go soon," murmured the addict of ambiguity.

Cuddy sat up and stretched. She stood, turning on the light and he followed. Woeful and apologetic his last word was a slurred "Sorry" when he stepped on her bare toes in the hallway.

No cathartic farewell, no goodbye kiss.

They snuck back downstairs and House crept out the door and back to his bedroom, full of packed boxes and too many suitcases. The swelling heart in his virgin chest had stopped beating. A part of him died that day, a part only reunion could revive.

Cuddy stood at the screendoor shivering but compelled to keep vigil. Andrew passed, going to bed and asked what she was looking at. She honestly had no idea.

"Seeing how much it snowed," she assured him. She lied about her hopes of a delay or cancellation with crossed fingers and a grimaced expression. The sense of something worse than weather festered deep and for no reason.

The next day she woke to see the snow had hardly laid. The bus was on time, the sky dismally anemic. An ice storm arrived by lunch, draining and dragging the day into a slow stagnancy.

Cuddy came home to see the old Dutch colonial next door was empty again, the real estate sign frosted in the front yard No curtains, no blinds, no note in the mailbox, just snow and ice and a merciless winter alone.

_**aftermath (or letting go of the love of your life)**_

For a week she wept. Cuddy could never let her mother or sister know the depths of her anguish. She would run a hot bath, sit on the edge of the tub and cry quietly. After, she'd rub the steam obscured mirror and curse the reflection with bloodshot eyes, for being hopeful, for expecting a happy ending.

In the middle of the night her shattered heart would wake her, and she'd muffle the choked sobs by burying her face in her pillow, wet with wasted tears. Sometimes she'd turn on her bedside lamp and reach for the bottle opener, wondering why that if he knew, he never told her. The polaroids were another painful reminder hidden under her mattress.

Three seasons––not even.

In the span of such a short time, so much had happened. Lies and lapses, confusion and bruises and the loss they'd never outlive––love eclipsed but not extinguished.

-

Overseas again, there were times House thought of running, stowing himself away or hitchhiking until the blue mailbox was in sight, the girl he let get away within reach.

Restless with shallow roots, he accepted a life of loneliness, no sacrifice but a concession for being the best. He even convinced himself they'd dodged a bullet, that he would have only gotten her pregnant, that they would have ruined the rest of their lives by coupling now. The idea of diluting their destiny was dim justification. His greatest fear was mediocrity but some part of him was still certain she'd have made him better, not held him back.

-

A full recovery was eventually made. Cuddy cajoled herself into attending the Valentine's dance with Bobby Carraway. In a few years she'd graduate valedictorian, take tours of top universities but ultimately have her decision be determined by Gregory House's reputation, his expulsion from Hopkins and transfer to Ann Arbor.

The legend and the love of her life remained lost no less. They were supposed to be high school sweethearts and naive young newlyweds but they never found each other again, no collegiate contingency could reconnect them.

House finished high school a soldier's son. Pining, no girl could compare and he soon formed a philosophy founded on philandering.

It was only a matter of time before Lisa seemed to him unreal, an incorporeal figment, then a transparent pillar of warmth, striding through a barren isolated life where it would always be winter until––

They were enrolled three semesters together at Michigan before House transferred again, getting his foot in five schools before finishing with a double specialty in Nephrology and infectious disease.

The insurrection of his ego by that most unlikely emotion––romantic love––he resisted for as long as he could. Growing pains through muscle death and the prospect of amputation, love was found only to be forfeited again.

A void would remain in their hearts, a hollow symmetry that nobody could fill. No entrepreneur mechanic husband, no trigger happy constitutional lawyer.

Perhaps not even each other.

There would be love in their lives, but never the same love twice.

Not even a chance.

Until now.


	4. Three Days

_**three days**_

The memory is more a mirage when the wake up call shrieks shrill the next morning. Liquid consolation from the night before is a migraine. A hungover House's arm dangles over the edge of the hotel bed, an empty bourbon bottle still in his gradually awakening grasp.

The layover is over after today. Despondent, he stands and struggles to the bathroom where he decides not to shave. A austere fear radiates in his chest as

he checks out of the hotel; cane and carryon and another interview at another hospital––

His flight doesn't leave until tomorrow morning but this dawns on him only after he's back inside PPTH, with no real conception of where he'll go from here.

A strange nostalgia stalks him in these halls. He's only been here once but they feel familiar, as if he's already deciphered their secrets, called the corridors home, like it's an old haunt more than an ordinary ivy league teaching hospital.

Cuddy's office is empty when he veers in the wrong direction, through pediatrics, past oncology and into endocrinology. The blue mailbox has become a nameplate, the ordinary girl next door an extraordinary woman, a respected doctor.

Head of a department and he thinks she can't be thirty––her coup is coming still.

Something else, or rather some_body_ else is making these new halls seem an abstract memory lane. Neck-tied and wing-tipped at a kiosk stands a familiar face. House steps closer and angles his head over the unsuspecting man's shoulder, lurking.

"Jimmy Wilson, boy wonder oncologist. Still living down that ten years bad luck?

Wilson winces, grinning as he recognizes the voice and remembers the bar's broken antique mirror.

"...with the agony of alimony?" House finishes, reminded of manila guised legality

and his divorce deduction.

"Two, actually. What are you doing here House?"

"Interview with Nephrology."

"I thought they were only hiring instructors."

House nods.

"And how did you hear about it so fast? Human resources hasn't even started accepting resumes yet."

"I know the head of endocrinology."

Wilson squints, tilting his head incredulously.

"You know Cuddy?"

There's something more Wilson wants to ask, or tell him. Nephrology isn't the only department hiring, half the hospital is being replaced. But he's holding up the line, and too polite to let an interrogation ensue.

"Well, good luck," he says paying for his coffee and excited for House's potential at Princeton Plainsboro.

Fifteen minutes later, House shakes hands with the Chief of Medicine of the second hospital of his second interview during his short stay in the garden state. He smiles and nods, is obediently hypocritical. In the middle of justifying his last three dismissals, he deduces that the rather pompous, rather senile chief has already chosen his nephew, the newborn nephrologist whose article on the evolution, advances and future of dialysis is framed and centered behind uncle dean, to be heir to the department.

Despite an old friend's good intentions he never had a chance. Anger swells, punctuated in his expression by the frustration of the futility.

Maybe he thinks he doesn't deserve to be happy. Maybe, as much as he wants it, he's afraid of staying. House knows this opportunity is a grenade in his hand. Not pulling the pin is impossible.

By the time Wilson bites into his lunch, House is supinr and still unemployed on a bench outside, staring at the September sky.

An engine soars overhead and he thinks he'll be on a plane soon, stuck mobile in the bleak blue universe. He's thinking he should have shut up and that she'll be better off without him. And he's thinking he needs a drink.

So he finds a bar, and another. When the third cuts him off, he finds a phonebook.

Cuddy, L––925 Market St.

He hails a cab and heads into the suburbs, wanting this lifelong layover to end,to find a way, a reason to stay (or at least to get laid).

_**one night**_

Incessant pounding at her front door forces Cuddy from a comfortable spot curled up in her favorite chair, in front of the first crackling fire of the season. She rushes toward the noise expecting an emergency, an accident––her neighbors all know she's a doctor.

The door opens and she's surprised to see House, for an instant, before he falls forward and she catches him. Except she's not just catching him, she's kissing him. Or he's kissing her, the weight of him a relief, the collision a kind of accidental completion. The response of her mouth to his isn't tentative or hungry but accustomed somehow, as if they'd done this a hundred times instead of once.

"God I missed you."

He's murmuring on the reciprocated exhalation, not letting go. Stuck ecstatic at the unexpected, Cuddy moans into his mouth. Another minute lapses, lost.

"House," she protests finally. But the name gets lost in the frisson of their lips and she lets it.

"House!"

She pulls back, breathing. She can still feel his tongue in her mouth when she says his name.

She'll always feel it.

"What are you doing here?"

"Interview didn't go so well," he says, all his air escaping with a thoroughly liquored yawn.

"It's Wilson's fault," House whines. "He's a lousy reference."

His eyes fix on the open slit in her robe, gooseflesh spreading above the cleft of her cleavage.

"Wow. The labcoat and pencil skirts don't do you justice."

Cuddy blushes, in spite of his brazen, albeit inebriated nerve. She gazes at him with a smile of melancholy recognition and understanding. She'll always see the boy, scarred and bleeding and abrasively sincere. His face is flushed, his knuckles calloused and curled around the cane, eyes the same indescribable blue. This is just another scene lit by that same tragic beauty.

"Sit down," she says, sighing away her shock and elation.

"I'll get you some coffee."

Cuddy goes toward the kitchen and he watches the backs of her ankles, bare above pink slippers. The shape of her calves is the last thing he sees.

Somnolence dissolves into sleep. Jetlagged and discouraged, House is passed out, slumped drunk on her couch by the time she comes back. So she sets the coffee down and watches him sleep. There's an ineffable dissonance in seeing a childhood friend years later. Or there should be. Some incongruity, some altered or unrecognizable aspect.

Except there's not.

The hair at the crown of his head is thinning, the shadow of a beard has spots of gray. Sitting sound asleep in a leather jacket, tshirt and jeans is the same person, the same presence she loved then and loves, quite possibly, even more now.

On an almost involuntary whim, she goes to her attic, digs and searches and dusts off an old box. Then she returns to the living room and recurls till she's comfortable in the chair beside him.

-

They're together in every faded polaroid, the only ones she kept, sacred and secret. She can't say how they ended up here or why her love for him has always been a heresy, a transgression; angst ridden and inexpressible. Printed ballpoint, her confessions are another heartrending reminder.

Friendship––she wrote at fourteen, was proof of something stronger than ideology, science or religion. Cuddy sips, soaking in the strange truth. She owes him more than a caffeinated nightcap. An alliance was made outside a grocery store. Alliance and attraction, his return she can't waste.

She's leafing through an old notebook, a spiralbound relic from her first biology class––her first labs and scalpels and amphibian cadavers––when she feels him begin to rouse conscious.

"Sorry," House says, something close to sober. A beat later he opens his eyes.

The album's in her lap. A moat of stray snapshots surrounds her and steam is billowing from the mug in her hand. The fire's warm, the aura welcoming and when she says "Don't be," he believes her. She elaborates her consolation:

"I've thought of you."

Too. Often. Cuddy knows it's less revelation than confirmation.

"How have you been? Hopkins hired you, right?"

"Hired, fired. Followed by four more."

She nods a nod that's neither surprised nor judgmental.

"Do you want me to call you a cab?"

He motions yes because it's logical and the dark stupor obscuring his folly is slowly being lifted. Cuddy leaves the room and makes the call. Returning,

"Where are you calling home these days?"

A girlish anxiousness resonates in her voice. She's not curious about the leg, the limp, the succession of terminations. She wants to know if she'll see him again. She wants to know where to find him if she needs him. Or, if he needs her.

In this life she'll never see him die though, never save his life. Not yet.

He shrugs. Most of his stuff is still in Florida. But he hasn't been there in weeks. He's an exile, an itinerant more now than ever.

"What about family? Wife and kids?"

House shakes his head but it's Cuddy who mourns his denial of domesticity––the hearth, the home, the happiness she's suspected he'd never have.

"What about you?" House starts, the panic imperceptible.

She wasn't wearing a ring yesterday and his eyes dart across the room scanning for clues, a family portrait on the mantle, men's boots by the door––anything. The knot in his stomach shoots to his heart, twisting. He finally asks.

"Married?"

Cuddy pauses. It would be all too easy to spill her despair. She was married; miscarried, divorced. She wants to tell him, to tell _someone_ but she doesn't want to seem a weak cliché. She _was_ married, past tense.

"No," is the only syllable she lets herself say.

Something's conveyed in the silence though. And seconds later Cuddy stands, picking up the box and sinking back down on the couch and close to him. House hesitates, wanting to put his arm around her but reaching in and rotating a few pictures instead.

"The summer I let my hair grow out," he huffs to himself, almost embarrassed.

Then he sees the diary and picks it up, blinking with an envious appreciation that she recorded their love story when it was pure; untainted by the future, by failures and infarctions.

"Today I had tennis practice," he starts, reciting from a random page near the end.

"After, we had to go pick Lindsey up from summer school somewhere close to Cincinnati. I was exhausted when we finally made it home. All I wanted to do was take a shower but mom sent me to the store first. I got on my bike and peddled and an obnoxious noise was following. When I stopped to see why, what I found was that the jerk nextdoor House had cut straws to half the spokes' length and glued them to both wheels, so that I couldn't go anywhere without the annoying clack..."

He starts laughing, amused as relieved that she managed to collate the sentimental antics of that summer. Cuddy keeps a straight face, remembering the harmless hell he put her through, the torment of every ride and return. Then her glower gives way and she beams, a hand running along his leg in some pithy admixture of affection and affectation.

"Did I really pick on you that much?"

"You terrorized me."

The flecks in her eyes, black and white in his mind for too long, shine. House leans in, wanting to discern the exact color. Gray green against the incandescently furled flame of the fireplace. There's a pull, more than magnetic, like a compass needle turning toward deliverance, that draws him closer. He'd kiss her if her face weren't bowed. Instead he looks down to see what tangibly untouchable memory it is she's looking at.

The fourth of July.

"I thought I fell in love with you that day," escapes his lips softly sincere. A weight's lifted. Like a cannonball chained to his soul, he's carried her with him all these years.

"I watched you that night."

Cuddy smiles, shutting her eyes as he waxes wistful.

"I was there, stooping shy behind the willow tree."

"It was a chestnut."

House struggles with the memory then agrees, brooding a few moments with two thoughts. First, how they'd overcome the hopeless impossibility of reconciling what different people remember about the same event, and secondly that in a unexpectedly overwhelming way, Cuddy moves him as a woman the same way she had moved him as a girl.

Then he realizes the unacknowledged and unconscious objective of the entire adolescent adventure wasn't seduction or possession but the puzzle––platonic as it was, innocent and incomplete. Now this, a junction where destiny merges with happenstance, could mean nothing.

Or it could be his last chance with the love of his life.

As if he's startled by her final materialization, by the proximity of what's been so far away for so long, he slants away. Something silver and metallic in her palm,catches his eye.

The bottle opener.

"My dad wanted to kill me when he found out I gave you that book," she says, letting the bar blade fall back into the box. "And that you were gone."

Forever. She thinks, and again.

"I missed you too, House."

They know the circularity of the conversation signals an end. More than anything, Cuddy wants to close the space between them, to kiss him and cauterize the wound of want, of waiting. But tomorrow he'll be a ghost again, and she knows one night won't be enough.

House cocks his head, eyes lucid bright. A confused beat then Cuddy stands. Decided, she moves her empty mug and stretches across him for his.

When she does, his hands rise to each side of her hips. The belt of her robe is too easy to undo.

Standing in front of him, she shivers, cradling his head as he lifts the sheer satin separating them. Bringing his lips to her stomach, bare and beautiful and quivering:

"I never stopped loving you, Lise."

He holds her like that, holding his breath, as if the essence of her, fixed immutable in his memory––tonight incarnate––might vanish if he lets go.

An ache's reawakened and Cuddy acquiesces. The pale line of her throat descending, she straddles his lap; a slow collapse into his arms and embracing the past. She's trembling, and he's trying not to. His hold tightens, his thigh tense. The beard burns from her cheek to her chest, making her toes curl as they lift off the floor, out of slippers, shifting her weight to his left leg.

Her lips finally find his and it's all that he wants, all that he is; a reflection in her eyes, a second first kiss.

Cloying, electric the taste he's gravitating toward is familiar––it wasn't coffee she was drinking tonight but hot chocolate, the sweetness of yesterday lingering evocative.

A honk, sonorous, abrupt, they try to ignore.

The cab she called. Another and they're plunged back into the reality of leaving.

House refuses to open his eyes, burying his face in the linear shadow down her body that the fireplace casts.

Between the pounding and honking the neighbors are awake. And, timid or guilty or coming to her senses, Cuddy pulls away, kissing his temple as her bare feet are grounded cold and his eyes open.

"I should go," he says, the arousal of an amorous adolescent, denim-confined and bulging, slowing his stance.

Groping for his cane, he can't look at her. He just pushes his weight on the pine appendage and limps toward the door, away from her another last time.

Indecision drums loud in her ears. It's panic and pain and regret and she can't watch––

She turns away, a desultory reach finds a stack of snapshots but she drops them. The scattered days of summer spread a memory mosaic. House opens the door. On the threshold he hears her holler his name.

"Wait," walking over to him.

Fighting tears, Cuddy stands helpless as she did watching the first snow of their last season. The fourth of July photo, bending in her closed palm, she puts in his open hand.

"Keep it."

With her lips half-parted and a clouded look in her eyes, Cuddy arches tiptoe to kiss him goodbye this time, brushing the shadowed slant of his cheek with hers.

House budges. Any certainty he had about the situation capsizes. His boarding pass ceases to exist. His hands frame her face and they're kissing and nothing else matters.

The door slams shut with her back up against it.

They stop thinking with an almost painful relief, stop seeing. Her hand flattens against his chest then fists to clutch his shirt. The cane and carryon are thrown to the floor.

It feels like her last breath when the circle of his arms closes around her, never tight enough. Fallen prey to some wild upheaval of his heart, House is lifting her off her feet, a soundless resuscitation bringing them both back to life.

The cab driver catches on and pulls away, eventually

A lamps shatters, sneakers stomp, knuckles and palms punch every wall that isn't a door. The cacophony of kismet, and then a refrain.

Leaning, twisting, leading and tripping, they make their way to the bedroom. House kicks his shoes off and his pants follow, making him lose his balance and land half off the bottom of the bed. The leather jacket lands a vestige and she's clinging to him again as he pulls her down onto his lap.

They fall back together, smiling.

The silk robe's shed, each thin strap of her nightgown slips from Cuddy's shoulders. More immaculate than ever, she's bear, and he's almost bashful, exuding the exploratory inexperience of an eager virgin.

Cuddy initiates confident. Concentrating on his jugular, she laves his griseled chin, tasting autumn and aftershave and staying there until she can't resist tugging his shirt up and away, bending in again, chest to chest, their two hearts bound and pounding into a singular pulse.

Then it's only a matter time––making up for all they lost, making out with the fury and enthusiasm they never exhausted on each other as teenagers. They're only tongues and teeth and lips and goosebump-raising moans, with no existence outside the kiss.

He palms her breast, feeling the burn of her blushing cheeks. Neither of them is a novice, still there's a thrill in the newness of the simplest touch. Even if it stops here, it would be the most memorable, most meaningful, mind blowing––

It doesn't stop. Her nipple is a bud in his mouth, taut and sweet, and his erection, still hampered by cotton, swells between her tense thighs.

House strains toward her but she's pulling away. This is when he sees it. Nearly forgotten is the mole, lonesomely punctuating her shoulderblade, the long ago admired anomaly of her anatomy. He wants to dote on it. Study it. Worship it. In an instant he wavers with regret: one night will never be enough.

Regressing with the same regret, Cuddy laments that they weren't each other's firsts, that this experience isn't arbitrarily significant. Maybe this is better, she rationalizes with her obstinate optimism. There's no fumbling with bra clasps, no blood or tears or maladroit minutes after. They don't want their innocence back.

They want the pleasure of losing it again.

The effort to recapitulate eases the tension as she grinds against him. She kisses his chest, his stomach, tickling his navel with a long manicured fingernail. She deliberately avoids the obvious at first, reaching to remove his socks, and he mutters something pornographically puerile, trying to veil his vulnerability.

Her thumb's still curving along the arch of his foot while she tugs his tented boxerbriefs down to his ankles, letting gravity complete the striptease that's making him squirm.

She kisses his knee, his hip and he hopes he can ignore it, that he can close his eyes and forget that the scar's there––if her lips are over it. Then he feels her fingers trace the imperfect ridges, the moisture of her mouth grazing the hollow rift in between.

House doesn't cringe or flinch. He relaxes into her touch. For first time since that excruciating afternoon on the fairway of the eighth hole, since the surgical intervention that ended three undiagnosed days––for the first time in a long time, he's comfortable in his own skin.

Cuddy's bottom lip drags against the grain of hair on his left thigh. She takes him in her mouth, almost. House grabs her wrist, pulling impatient. It isn't that he doesn't want it, or that she doesn't want it. Three coeds have performed the lascivious deed for the deformed and undeserving doctor in the last twelve months and he can't demote her to that, those banal numb nights. This is a new chapter of his life. It could be.

Sex before Stacy was loveless, impulsive. Since the infarction it's been awkward and insignificant. Painful. But this, this is different and he can't taint it, can't adulterate or diminish the absolute perfection.

There's a moment as she rises, when time's transcended, disbelief suspended and reality washes over him.

House is naked beneath her and a little astonished at the finality of it. This is really, definitely happening. The strangeness of the scenario, of consensual intimacy added to the fact that she will, in some way, always be thirteen to him, makes him suddenly aware of the consequences, fearing the lackthereof.

Silence stretches between them. Pushing herself up, Cuddy kneels, spreading her legs wider so that they're only a fraction of an inch from fusing. She stares at him, searching until his blue-eyed, misunderstood melancholia meets her gray green desire to save him, if only from himself.

Tenderly, she presses her lips to the silhouette of stubble along his neck, as if trying to kiss the gray away. As she leans in to cover his lips with hers, she settles slowly. His hips pivot.

An echo of ecstasy in the slow smooth stroke, a transitory glimpse of their next time, then denouement.

Or déja vu.

With the ease of penetration comes an inexplicable sense of premeditation. This is unplanned and unexpected. But they've waited so long that their visions of the actual act are identical. There's no need to extemporize.

They lay still a warm quiet while, the reconnection palpably assuasive, replacing anxious vertigo with breathless relief. When Cuddy does start to move, it's tentative. She tries to shift subtle, away from the scar; tries to suppress her unbearably urgent need to ride relentless the exquisite solidity of him inside her and finally feel the viscid heat breaking in waves against her womb.

The first fluid thrust would be benediction, if either of them believed in god. They know, there is just this: the glide, gentle and focused and all the way in; his name soft and honest falling from her curved lips closed over his open mouth; his breath searing her skin when she arches back, passing over her like quicksilver.

His hands drift up the sides of her body. She undulates above him then comes down, prostrate panting, motionless. The heathen holds his last hope knowing that if heaven exists it could never compare to this, this consummate bliss.

House bucks encouragement erratic until her gasps become girlish giggles, and can't help but squeeze the dimples at the base of her spine. He pulls down heedlessly and hard to hear her choke down a whimpered scream when he bumps her cervix and she contracts.

He's the first man she's been with since the divorce. She's tight and receptive, and with his next collision kiss a wire's tripped and Cuddy realizes just how long, how much she's wanted this.

The unattainable and unrequited, lost and missed and remembered writhes willing and whole and helpless under her. His chest's heaving, his hand steady where he's touching her. They're making love like it's their last time, like it's the only thing they were ever meant to do.

Her hand splays across the pillow then rakes through his hair, pulling. The stubborn strength of his arms and the persuasion of his jaw perseveringly parting hers have Cuddy keening. House is pumping into her like he never wants to stop. She bites his lips when his fingers dig into her hips, a warning. He's close.

"Stay with me," she shudders, a plea for simultaneity, an invitation whispered weak that neither knows means everything.

House stalls, his thrusts idled and buried.

The pleasure suffusing his body, though threatening to short circuit his thought process completely, induces an epiphany: all the plane rides and highways, the decades of detours–– it's all led them not just to each other, but to this very moment.

A lifetime melts away, and it's more than carnal catharsis. Tonight is the antithesis of every empty, doomed-tragic ending. This is a beginning, it's _their_ beginning.

An afterthought. She's moving again, languid and clenching and he's lost.

Somewhere between oblivion and rebirth House comes––long and deep and taking her with him.

The flood––adrenaline, neurons––nostalgia most of all––forces all the fragments of their split psyches to come together, the way they are in the ephemerally vast release. The endless evanescence of pleasure, like the last paradox–– passion and pain, as fleeting as forever.

Spent, House closes his eyes. He's waited his entire life to feel this way, wanted and welcome and loved without lies. He can't let go and she won't either. They breathe deep and finally, together. He kisses her forehead, her eyes, still inside her, and drifts into a dream before the kiss can die.

-

Late, she wakes to kiss him goodbye, afraid, petrified he won't be here in the morning. Cuddy watches him sleep, with her, on the side of the bed that's been empty for years ; watches him swim to the surface of consciousness and dive back down again. The cadence of his breathing slows and she's still listening, her head resting against the rise and fall of his chest until they're just synchrony, asleep.

_**time (after time)**_

They must disconnect in the night because House wakes with his face hidden in the warm darkness of her throat, tucked behind the fanned shade and flora of mussed hair. His arm is draped diagonal shoulder to hip, pinning her. He sighs placid in her ear and opens his eyes to have his homesickness healed. The cure: the September sun rising outside her window, a new day with his first love––the sky's hue recurrent, vivid––raw blue verging on violet.

Then he's kissing her, wanting to repeat and refuse, to never separate. Behind then on top of her, he's got Cuddy trembling breathless before she's even awake.

Throbbing, imperfect but rejuvenated, his kisses trail from her temple to her clavicle, cherishing the crease of her chin and finally finding her open mouth; open because she's talking.

"What time is it?"

He can tell from the clarity of her words that they're not kissing anymore. He doesn't remember ever stopping. He doesn't want to.

"Early."

He's nuzzling between her breasts when he answers, his beard scratching linear along her collarbone, his sensual voice nonplussed. Her head turns away, searching for the time. House relents his affection, scraping his chin high on her shoulder and hoping that their last kiss wasn't their last.

"I have a board meeting in an hour," she says, an adult all of a sudden as she reaches for the alarm clock she forgot to set last night.

His heart sinks. Hers is too driven to be anchored by the anticlimatic fact that they're still time's captives, tethered to ticking hands, measuring mechanical. She rolls over and sits up, undoing the knot they thought they'd tied, torn in two by the thought.

A choice, dismal as inevitable, Cuddy makes. Getting out of bed, she's dressed in a flash until she's somebody else––nobody he recognizes. In the room then out, downstairs and back up, he listens to her heels, the snap of a pearl necklace clasped closed, the drip of a coffee pot.

"My flight doesn't leave until eleven," he reluctantly reminds, interrupting her hurried routine.

"Don't let me rush you," putting her earrings in.

"Take your time, eat. There's fresh fruit in the crisper and coffee still brewing. The spare key's under the front door mat, just lock it on your way out."

He nods, displaced, and bracing himself for the fatal blow of being alone indefinitely.

"It was nice seeing you again, House."

The door slams shut. Then another. Her car starts, and all he can do this morning after is listen. On the edge of the bed, he falls back, sprawled naked and abandoned on sheets that smell like her, like _them_.

Except he knows there is no them.

The stoicism he wore as a shield, moving and losing and letting go his entire life, House never outgrew. So he stands, slips into his boxerbriefs and decides to investigate.

Or snoop, really.

There's the bedside nightstand. The drawers' contents are boring; no condoms or vibrators or crimson penned journal detailing her sexual exploits. No birth control either. House makes a mental note to check her medicine cabinet (but never does).

Continuing to canvas the bedroom, the first interesting thing he finds is an anthology of expensive and newer photo albums in the back of her closet. Wedding portraits and honeymoon souvenirs, candid holidays and day trips, it's the ordinary stuff House could never understand, or compile.

On top is the undergraduate album, leading into a med school and graduation volume. "Partypants" is scribbled on the back of an incriminatingly self-explanatory loose snapshot, dated springbreak '84. Never has he yearned more

to have known Cuddy the coed.

At the back of the last album, the one that's less than half full, he turns every empty page, not knowing what he'll uncover, but suspecting it will be the answer to the end of a marriage.

Then he finds it. A sonogram. Cuddy carried to eighteen weeks. Still, what he feels isn't sympathy but self loathing. He could have been more, he could have been her second chance.

He digs for more skeletons in the closet but can only find her ex-husband's flannel robe and, instead of adjusting the thermostat, puts it on. The irony doesn't escape him: it fits.

In her kitchen he scours the cupboards and pantry to find something that doesn't promise to lower his cholesterol or shrink his dress size after one bowl. And he does––find a pint of chocolate ice cream frosted in the farthest reaches of her freezer.

After breakfast, still coping with the photographic revelations, and wearing a stranger's plaid, House changes. He's considered and reconsidered. It would be easy to stay, to miss his flight again, surprise her by being here when she comes back, by being someone he isn't.

But it's a promise he'll inevitably break; the priority has become the puzzle, and even if she does fill the empty space, no matter how happy she makes him he's afraid he'll never change. He'll never be able to make her happy.

House leaves late, locking the door, sliding the key under the welcome mat and not looking back.

_** (her) time aside: election**_

In a vain attempt to conceal her mixed emotions, a smiling Lisa Cuddy spills her latté on the table at the center of this long anticipated board meeting. Youth doesn't last and maturity rarely brings rewards. It has been long, cruel, crippling lesson for them both. But she's not prepared to submit to the terror of giving up hope.

If only––

She thinks, then pushes the thought down deep. She doesn't stand a chance. She's young, too young, and a woman in the misogyny of medicine. If only she had more control. Or less discretion.

She could have stayed with him, she could have finally run away. She still could. Quit. Speed to the airport and, in the spirit of romantic rebellion, buy a one way ticket. Leave. Live with him until her undying love sets her free or her better judgment sends her home.

Cuddy's heart teeters, heavier now on the scale her brain has always outweighed.

The grown up inside her is still dueling with the lovelorn little girl.

It's the old hypnotism of his intelligence that haunts her the most. Three days ago he diagnosed an entire waiting room, he caught the rare and the unremarkable. He's the best and she knows it. She's always known it. It was the senile dean's mistake not to hire him.

She looks at her watch. It's been less than an hour and she already misses him.

"Cuddy."

A voice declares and she blinks, torn from her girlish grievance by what seems like role call at the beginning of class.

"Cuddy," another voice affirms.

A hierarchy of voices is voting. The entire committee, and she can only look on in disbelief.

"Congratulations," grins Wilson minutes later, reaching to shake her hand. Then Cuddy realizes she'd been so caught up in the loss, and House, that she missed the moment she inherited a hospital.

Youngest Dean of Medicine, first female Chief at PPTH, one of the few in the country, and the accomplishment means less than the control. This is her chance, contingent, defyingly unlikely––her chance to change everything.

_** (his) time aside: terminal**_

House trips over the curb arriving on time at the airport, unusually unattentive and bruising his ankle.

Inside he shakes his head from side to side. He's completely his cynical self again, still trying digest the experience of this short stay. For three days he's lived like a madman in two worlds at once. He has been a boy of fifteen and a man of thirty-five, indissolubly and hopelessly the same.

Now, like then his fears have come in threes. Strange but true. All his unplanned plans have fallen through. The sum of seventy two hours is a one night stand, leaving them isolated again–– a jaded divorcée and functioning addict; pouring pills into his hand.

It betrayed his nihilism to believe that the convoluted confluence of their lives led them back to each other. He convinced himself it made sense, that it might work. But denial is a disease, chronic, ineradicable, terminally hopeful.

There is no such thing as security, or love, really, he muses miserable. Not the kind of love that lasts, with the woman he wants; who, the very thought of kissing makes him salivate. It hurts in a way opiates will never abate, knowing he will never have her again.

On a people mover, House is stuck. Involuntarily mobile, he stands solemn as lost luggage in baggage claim. A terminal awaits him, the panel lit with departures and delays. The fourth of July photo is still in his pocket and he holds it, keeping it there, knowing there's no choice but to stumble blindly forward, repeating history.

_**time after time, regained**_

Newark Liberty International Airport is a forty mile drive from Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. If she were going the speed limit, Cuddy would make it there fifteen minutes too late. The fifth grade equation spurs her. She accelerates, resolved to defy mathematics if necessary.

This is about more than a lost love, or best friend or the professional possession of a preeminent diagnostician. What they've retained, no matter the distance or the days between them, is a fidelity that's given unity to two lives that would have otherwise shattered into thousands of success-obsessed impressions.

The car's still running when Cuddy vaults out of it, racing inside before security can stop her. Reading the departure board, she scans destinations and times and gate numbers, begging fate for repeated respite.

Then she runs, for her life and his.

Limping crooked, with his backpack slung over his shoulder, House starts toward the gate leading to the plane that will take him away. Away. Not home, because he hasn't had one since Baker Street.

A line forms behind him, a convex crowd of other restless transients. He yawns, putting the headphones of his walkman over his ears and trying to tune out the reality of returning.

The back of his head is bobbing to whatever crooning-Jagger ballad is blaring philosophy while he waits for other people's tickets to be torn. Cuddy shuffles through the stagnant stream of strangers, yelling, panicked.

"House!"

He's so close but inching away though, reaching for his boarding pass. He can't hear her.

"House!

House–– _Stay_!" The fear and panic make it a slurred, piercingly desperate cry.

The terminal falls silent. The cause, at the center, turns around and ambles uneven in her direction, away from his life, that twenty year interim between kissing her.

"You can stay. You have a job here."

Catching her breath (and him):

"I'm Dean now."

They're closer. The unreality of propinquity, permanent, and the unfamiliar stability of standing still, starts House walking. He wants to put his arm around her, to kiss her, coerce her into giving him a department. He wants to make love to her for hours and every night, or here in the middle of Newark Liberty International's airside terminal; on the counter of the bookstore, in the corner of a Starbucks. He wants everything, all the dashed dreams and dowsed desires, everything all at once. Knowing he can't always get what he wants, he only beams speechless–– in love, home at last.

He has what he needs.

As they approach the exit, they know the first step outside is a start. House doesn't say a word and he doesn't have to. All his belongings in one bag, a constant recaptured, he holds the handicap accessible door open for her.

Cuddy looks back at him, an elated expression shining. They're side by side again, relieved that it's where they'll remain, aware that it's where they were always meant to be.

It's fall. They found each other. By the first snow they'll be bantering, breaking rules and beating odds, calling each other's bluffs and only deeper in love. Nikes lift off the crimson and auburn and yellow leaf-graced cement and into her still idling car. The door closes. As she shifts into drive, House knows they're done looking back. He makes her laugh by shattering the silence.

"Does this mean you're my boss now?"

Then, in this life, they finally move forward.

-


End file.
